Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
environments on the planet. 'Clayoquot Sound' involves networks of actors, values,
spaces and places, compromises and powerplays.
Although the physical action occurred in a remote rural locality the conflict was
also quite urban. The major logging company had its headquarters in Vancouver,
profits and products went to Toronto and Los Angeles, the Ministry of Forests was
located in Victoria and the environmentalists pitched their media messages to audiences
in New York and London. It demonstrated that if rural and urban areas are to be
sustainable, then linear production processes relying on a one-way extraction of
natural resources and the extensive waste of unused material have to be replaced
by a more circular model where waste is reused and recycled - a resource for further
productive activity. Clayoquot activists launched a global campaign to save other
temperate rain forests. Ecotourism was identified as the economic saviour of the
area, enabling business to become aligned with the environmentalists. However, the
indigenous people of the locality, the Nuu-chah-nulth, feared their place-based cultural
heritage would be overrun by more outsiders. As Warren Magnusson and Karena
Shaw (2002: 7-8) argue in
A Political Space: Reading the Global through Clayoquot
Sound
, Clayoquot is a site where many phenomena converge:
•
The globalization of political struggle through the mass media, cultural exchanges
and international trade relations.
•
The shift from an industrial (logging jobs) to post-industrial economy (tourism
jobs) dependent on information technology and orientated toward the consump-
tion of signs, of the aesthetic natural beauty of the Sound, in the global cultural
marketplace to attract tourists and their dollars.
•
Ethnonationalist resistance to the homogenizing impact of the capitalist economy
and Western culture.
•
The global challenge to patriarchal gender relations, as well as the norms of
sexual and personal identity, e.g. female corporate spokespeople feminizing the
image of an international logging company.
•
The rise of indigenous peoples as credible claimants to sovereignty under inter-
national law (British Columbia was not colonized through treaty negotiations).
•
The threat of environmental calamity and the concomitant rise of a globalized
environmental movement.
•
The continuing critique of state institutions for their political/democratic
inadequacy as a result of their actions, e.g. closed meetings, exclusion of elected
representatives, etc.
•
The problematization of science as a contested and highly politicized way of
knowing the world (whose science? in whose interests? incorporation of traditional
ecological knowledge in scientific deliberations, etc.) through its differing and
competing methodologies and truth claims.
Sandilands (2002) suggests the experience of Clayoquot offers lessons in the
delicate move towards dialogue and the recognition of pragmatic hybridity. In seeing
a future for the locality in tourism, both extractive industry and wilderness were
rejected as a multiplicity of interests, interpretations, perspectives, actions and goals
became entwined in the unending politics of sustainable development. A Memorandum
of Understanding between the major conflicting parties was signed in 1999 and the
United Nations designated the area a Biosphere Reserve in 2000. This settled some
